Weekend Bookworm: The Rule of Knowledge

11 October 2013 , 11:30 AM by Rob Minshull

The Rule of Knowledge by Scott Baker

Way back in 1942, the world's greatest science fiction writer Isaac Asimov created the Three Laws of Robotics. They were:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov's inviolable rules were the organising principle of all his robot novels, allowing his millions of readers to suspend disbelief and accept his science as integral to the fiction.

With time travel, however, there appear to be two competing and contradictory conventions in play: there is either a single fixed history which is unchangeable; or history is flexible and is subject to alteration through time travelling intervention.

A third option posits alternate timelines whereby multiple alternate histories can exist. This means when the time traveler goes back in time, they enter a new timeline where history may differ from the timeline they came from.

The so-called 'grandfather paradox' is avoided because even if the time traveler's grandparent dies at an early age in the new timeline, he or she still survived to have children in the original timelines. Thereby the time traveler still exists. This means that travelling through time could actually create a new timeline which diverges from the original at the precise moment the time traveler appears in the past.

Scott Baker cuts through all the confusion in his fantastic debut novel, The Rule of Knowledge. In Baker's novel the rule is quite simple: time travelers cannot change something they know to have happened. Lurching backwards and forwards in time, The Rule of Knowledge has been described as "part Matthew Reilly and part Dan Brown", and the description is spot on.

In an adventure which begins in the near future and stretches back 2000 years, Shaun Strickland, a young physics teacher, receives an invitation from Cambridge University to deliver a lecture on the relationship between time and space. It is something he has been studying for years and driving late at night to catch his plane to the UK, Shaun runs over a homeless man on a lonely, desolate road.

The man is carrying an ancient diary, written in perfect modern English and predicting the exact moment it will be found - and by whom. Beginning with the life of Saul the gladiator, the young teacher reads about the amazing story of a time traveler whose mission it is to meet Jesus. But a mysterious group of people want the diary and are prepared to murder anyone in their path to get it.

Will Shaun stay alive long enough to unwrap the riddle of time travel and can his mind survive the many encounters with his own past and future selves? What is the meeting with Jesus supposed to achieve or prove? And what if Jesus doesn't die on the cross after all?

"The boundaries of Shaun's beliefs squeezed outwards under the pressure of the new information. Why was it so hard to believe? Did he want there to not be some sort of God? He examined himself and realised that he had shut himself off to even the possibility for one simple reason; it meant that he was wrong ... If he was wrong, then maybe there was a chance there was a God of some sort. Maybe Jesus was some sort of divinely inspired, connected, all-knowing deity, and if all that were possible, then that meant that maybe death was the end Shaun had always asserted it to be."

Pseudo science and philosophical theology permeate The Rule of Knowledge and do nothing to detract from the rapid pace of the plot or the thrill of the action. A few annoying errors aside - it is the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, not the Plaza del Sol, and it is impossible to see the lights of Jerusalem from the sea - Scott Baker has written a thoroughly modern version of H.G Wells' The Time Machine.

"Da Vinci Code meets Spartacus meets the Time Traveler's Wife," wrote Australian thriller writer Greg Barron. Indeed. Faith, science and love collide in this ingenious tale of historical twists which guarantees suspense and introduces a powerful new voice to the world of science fiction thrillers.